Wednesday, May 31, 2006

"One of the questions people ask about the new user interface is "how much training is required to get up to speed?"

Well, our design goal was to require no training at all. From the earliest prototypes, we were trying to design an experience so that people could sit down in front of Office 2007 and be effective right away at getting their work done. One of the reasons we didn't go more radical on the overall design was that we wanted to make the product comfortable to use--after all, at the end of the day, it's still Microsoft Office.

The design of the Home tab of each app, which contains many of the familiar features from the old Standard and Formatting toolbars, is a nod to trying to ensure a level of comfort. This is something we were watching carefully in each of the long-term deployments of Office 12 Beta 1 and again as part of the process of rolling out many companies around the world on Beta 2. Based on what we've seen so far, I'm optimistic that we have achieved that level of "first-hour comfort" across the basic feature set. The few things that did cause roadblocks with early users (such as the placement of a View menu down on the status bar) we repaired in later designs (in this case, by including a View tab in the Ribbon.)" continued ... (Via Jensen Harris)